I am working and traveling today, so this will be necessarily brief, but I wanted to write about something of monumental consequence that has been bothering me for a long time.

In the old cartoon “The Smurfs,” there were exactly one hundred of the tiny blue creatures in the hidden Smurf Village, and each one had his own mission in life. There was a comedian Smurf, a farmer Smurf, a bodybuilder Smurf, a self-proclaimed genius Smurf, and so on. Even as a child, I found this system to be efficient but flawed for reasons I will not delve into here.

Anyway, one of the Smurf stereotypes was a painter. His name was, coincidentally, Painter Smurf. Painter Smurf’s uniform was a beret and a smock, and he was always trying to paint his masterpiece, which in his French accent he pronounced “masterpayza.”

My question is, where did he get the French accent? Supposedly, these were the only Smurfs in the world, so it was not as if he was on a Smurf exchange program. Even if he were only affecting it, where would he have heard a French accent before? He lived in a mushroom that was not wired for cable television.

Painter Smurf was simply too implausible.